I'm a C# developer having worked with .Net since it was in beta. Before that I mainly worked in C and C++. I have been developing commercial software for more than 20 years. I also mess around with microprocessors, but that's just for fun. I live near Cambridge, England and work from home in my 'silicon shed'.

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I have had some fun in the last few of days. I decided to upgrade to the latest version of Nim ... because I had gotten a couple of releases behind I think. It is not a hard thing to do, but was just something that I had not gotten round to.

Anyway, for some reason, I decided to rebuild everything, including the Aporia IDE whilst I was at it. That's where things went a bit wrong, and sadly I had already binned the previous version of Aporia. So I was at risk of not having my IDE for Nim.

Whenever I tried to use Nimble (Nim's package manager) to rebuild Aporia, I was getting errors about dependency conflicts with GTK. Eventually, I grabbed the Aporia repository and was able to hack the aporia.nimble file. If you're really interested, I found that removing #head from where it says it requires gtk2 did the trick. Finally, I was able to build the latest Aporia. Phew, panic over.

After having figured all that out, I was looking at the Nimble repository on GitHub and noticed this build failure:

So ... it looked like bad timing. Not being able to install Aporia was being worked on. This must be due to the Nim incarnation of dependency hell I guess. But I can now report that this problem has been fixed anyway. It seems that I had just chosen the wrong moment to do my rebuild. It happens.

After a little more digging and some discussion on GitHub, it appears that I had been using a bleeding-edge copy of the Nimble package manager. So it's understandable that things might break. When I retraced my steps, I realised that I had installed Nimble from a script included with the release of Nim I had been using. That script installs the bleeding edge version, which is probably the wrong thing to do. So I logged that as an issue on the Nim repository. But it seems like the next release of Nim is just round the corner anyway. I'll try to upgrade to that version more quickly this time!

So, for the time being all is well. I have the latest release of Nim installed and Aporia is back. I've also replaced Nimble on my machine with the latest tagged version (manually), so in the meantime I should have a more stable setup. And I kind of enjoyed all this stuff anyway, so no worries.